


the world is gonna burn, burn, burn

by wolfinglet



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Altered Mental States, Canon compliant up to 3B, Dissociation, Gen, Horror, Implied Character Death, M/M, Stiles is a serial killer, Stiles is the big bad, this is not a happy story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-11 01:00:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1166724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfinglet/pseuds/wolfinglet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the first body turns up, Stiles knows it’s inside him.</p>
<p>The Void.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the world is gonna burn, burn, burn

When the first body turns up, Stiles knows it’s inside him.

The Void.

The darkness everyone keeps talking about—keeps thinking is going to seep through their open doors, the cracks in their defenses, their gaping vulnerabilities. It got to Stiles first, is getting to him now, and he knows, somehow. He knows that the twisted, mangled body, mangled  _thing_  his dad finds on the side of the road is his fault.

There are pictures on the news that make Stiles’s stomach warm from the inside out. Hungry. Comfortable. Wanting. Proud.

He throws up. He can’t eat at all that day, and he goes around school in a haze, moving from place to place without registering anything but Scott’s occasional worried glances.

“Dude,” Scott says, “are you okay?”

_No. No. No. No no no I’m not oh my god help me please._

“I’m fine,” he says, voice cool.

“Sure.” Scott lingers. “Lemme grab my stuff and I’ll walk you—”

“I said I’m fine.”

Scott doesn’t believe him. Stiles doesn’t need to be able to hear Scott’s heartbeat to read the untruths in his face. Scott is a terrible liar and always has been. Stiles is the good liar. Stiles is the one with the darkness inside him. Has had the knot of it in his chest, worse when his mom died, worse and worse since Scott was bitten and Stiles realized that not only did he not have the capability to care about more than a few people, he didn’t  _want_  to care. And the people he didn’t care about, he could. He wanted. He could—

He has blood on his hands.

Stiles stops walking.

Where—

He’s—

… in the woods.

Blood on his hands. Where’s his backpack? His phone is—

… in his pocket.

Stiles’s whole body is shaking and it takes him five tries to unlock his phone, sweep his thumb over the right button to see that it’s nine at night and there are eighteen missed calls from Scott, his dad, and Derek.

“Not again,” he murmurs, pleads. So much lost time, he’s lost, too, and he wishes, oh god, for the first time he wants it to be a dream. He just wants it to be over. Let him wake up, let him scream his throat raw, let him please be okay, he just wants it to be over, he just wants it to end.

He has ten fingers. Blood caked under his nails. He can read the panicked texts on his phone.

He feels blank inside.

Or, no. He feels… open. Sucking. Like a black hole is open inside him, instead of a door.

He puts his blood-slick phone back in his pocket and turns around. It’s too dark to see if there’s tracks, but he goes back the way he came, and something in him gnaws, gnaws, gnaws the closer he gets. Polarization. Magnetism. Serial killers go back to the scenes of their crimes. One’s an incident, two’s a coincidence…

There’s nothing coincidental about the man Stiles finds.

Stiles’s brain roars back full force, driving down the vapid blankness, and Stiles zooms in on the details. The branch. Bulging eyes. Blood. Blood. Limp hands. Broken wrist.

He doesn’t understand how he kills them. He doesn’t understand how he—skinny, less skinny than he used to be, but still 150 pounds—could drive a grown man back far enough and fast enough to impale him the way he’s stuck on the tree branch. An offering. On display.  _Look at me, look what I did._

The way the branch is sticking out his chest. Stiles lifts his hands, can almost see the way they were fisted in the man’s shirt.

The Void inside him stirs. He can  _feel_  it curling in his chest, arching up, rubbing along the underside of his breastbone like a happy cat. It likes his work here.

_This isn’t just you._

Their work.

_This isn’t you_.

This is the second body, and Stiles knows it’s going to happen again.

One’s an incident, two’s a coincidence, three’s a pattern.

He won’t stop at three.

He licks his lips reflexively, nervous and disconnected, and tastes blood, thick, sticky, tacky on his tongue. It’s all over his face. On his mouth. Probably in his mouth. Did he swallow it? Did he do it on purpose?

(He did.)

Stiles backs away from the body. He needs—

He needs—

He needs to stay calm. He knows how to take care of this.

A creek, he thinks. He’ll find a creek. Wash the blood off.

And then he turns around, and Derek is standing there.

Derek’s hands, by his sides, are clawed, tense, and Stiles sees the wide glint of his murderer-blue eyes. Traitor, those eyes say. Killer. Except they’re talking about Stiles, not Derek, because all Derek ever did was try to save a girl he loved, and all Stiles is doing is descending, is being swallowed and eaten easily by a darkness he recognizes as something he wants, something his visceral traitor mind is welcoming and will welcome over and over and over until it consumes everything he used to be, everyone he used to be able to love.

“You did this,” Derek says hollowly. He’s looking over Stiles’s shoulder. At the body.

It isn’t a question.

Stiles stares at the ground.

“ _Stiles_.”

“This is just a dream,” Stiles mumbles.

Derek must hear the lie, because he’s there between one blink and the next, touching Stiles’s shoulders with his claws still out. That blankness is coming back, Stiles wrapped in film, shutting down, shutting off in the face of someone who could care about him. Who does care about him, at least enough to come find him in the night.

“Stiles, look at me,” Derek’s saying, but Stiles can’t get his eyes to focus beyond the ski-slope bridge of his own nose and the way Derek isn’t wearing a jacket or a scarf or anything, just a thin t-shirt, and his upper arms have goosebumps on them.

And how he stinks of fear.

This must be what it’s like all the time, for them. They can smell fear, and arousal, and blood in veins from hundreds of feet away. People must smell like prey so often, to them.

Right now, Derek smells like prey.

“Stiles,” Derek says again, “Stiles, Stiles,” with a hand coming up to cup the back of Stiles’s neck and another sliding into his hair, tugging, trying to force Stiles’s head up so Derek can meet his eyes. So he can try to—what? Drag Stiles back? Make him sane, make him whole, make him light again? Stiles lets him try, tilts his head too far, purposefully far, letting his neck bend concave so all he can see is the sky overhead and the swaying of the trees, their unkind, winter-beaten silhouettes, nature standing guard as nature takes its course.

His hands ache, so he puts them on Derek’s sides. Like he’s supposed to. His fingernails dig in. Like claws. Like the claws of the worst monster he can imagine.

“Stiles,” Derek whispers, and Stiles closes his eyes to see the Void smile at the terror in his voice.


End file.
